TIME AND CHANGE 
speck of protoplasm to-day will have the credit of 
unlocking a power in inorganic nature; he will prove 
by a short cut how immanent the creative energy 
or the vital force of the universe is in matter. He 
will not have eliminated the creative energy; he will 
only have disclosed it and availed himself of it. 
We behold spontaneous combustion, a fire self- 
kindled, but we do not see the activity of the par- 
ticles of matter that preceded it or penetrate the 
secret of their mysterious affinities. The fire was 
potential there in the very constitution of the ele- 
ments. We flout at miracles, and then we disclose 
an unending miracle in the life about us. 
All the life upon the globe, including man with all 
his marvelous powers, surely originated upon the 
globe, surely arose out of the non-living and the non- 
thinking, not by the fiat of some power external to 
nature, but through the creative energy inherent 
in nature and ever active there. The great physical 
instrumentality was heat — without heat the reac- 
tion called life could never have taken place. This 
fact has led a French biologist to say that life is only 
a surface accident in the history of the thermic 
evolution of the globe. Without the disintegration 
of the rocks and the formation of the soil and the 
precipitation of watery vapor, which was indirectly 
the work of heat, the vegetable and the animal could 
not have developed. If we succeed in proving that 
all these things are of chemico-mechanical origin, 
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